Electronics > Beginners
How to start? Asking some hints on first design, laptop, CAD...
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claudiostazzone:
Hi Dave! Hi to you all!
My name is Claudio (39 years old) and I live in Italy (on the other side of the planet.. :) ). I am an EMC engineer since 2008 and I work in an EMC lab in Turin.

I have subscribed to your channel after having seen a lot of your videos.. I really like the way you explain things!!

As an EMC engineer I am developing (the path is very long though..) the ability to troubleshoot PCB board, because I see that this is what our customers are asking every day.

I graduated in Telecommunications and I have never practiced Electronics design... except three projects in school, using an old Orcad version running under DOS..!! :(
But now, I would like to join my experience in EMC together with Electronics design. So, for this I have a few questions for you...

1) Am I late to learn Electronics Design? (Yeahh, stupid question??)
2) How can I begin? To start, could be useful to replicate at home a (opensource) project by somebody else? Other strategies?
3) What software can I use? Is it worthy to begin with free ones (like KiCad?), or let's go with PRO packages like Altium (they cost a lot of money...)?
4) What kind of PC do you use? Ram, CPU, video card?

I think that's all... I really thank you for your time!

Cheers!

Claudio
PS: I do think that Mr. Crocodile Dundee is one of my favorite film characters.. when I watch your videos, in some ways you resemble him... especially when it's Mailbag time... guess why.. :)
hamster_nz:
1) It is never too late to learn anything!

2) Build something simple you are interested in having as a project to build experience with the tools.

3) I find KiCAD is actually pretty good.

4) For me, any recent PC or laptop is fine for initial projects. Mine is an i3 laptop, 8GB RAM using Intel graphics. A SSD helps
claudiostazzone:
Hi Hamster_Nz,
thank you very much for your reply and for your suggestions!!
Cheers!

Claudio
james_s:
I designed dozens of PCBs using KiCad on an ancient Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM so you don't need anything fancy there. Any computer capable of running a modern web browser will run a tool like KiCad, I've even run it on a raspberry pin just to see if it would work.
rstofer:
My projects are simple so I don't use a fancy package like KiCad or Altium.  I looked at Eagle one time and the learning curve was too steep, for me.  So I use ExpressPCB software and board services.  Nothing is automated, I have to do all the routing by hand but, somehow, it all works out.  For my projects.  FWIW, I use the 'Classic' version because it ties the schematic to the routing process.  I don't think the new version has that feature although it is planned.  I haven't looked into it in a couple of years, the Classic version is entirely adequate.

https://www.expresspcb.com/expresspcbplus/

If I need a uC for a project, I don't design a board with a uC, I plug a stamp format uC board into a daughter card that I design.  The Arduino NANO comes to mind but I'm much more likely to use the MBED LPC1768.  I have also designed daughter cards for the STM Nucleo boards.  The SLab project is one such daughter card - works well!

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9564
https://store.arduino.cc/usa/arduino-nano

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/small-lab-(slab)-release/msg1428529/#msg1428529
https://github.com/R6500/SLab

I like messing around with FPGAs and I find Xilinx Vivado to be quite slow.  The older ISE was bad, Vivado is worse.  So I built up a machine with an I7 7700K, 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD drive.  Now, it is tolerable.  Clearly, Vivado will run on lesser hardware but I have a short attention span.

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